Can someone point me to a good comparison of current and future mobile GPUs? With the likelihood of new MacBook Pros in September, I'm curious to see what chips Apple will be choosing from. (In any event, it'll be a bit speedier than my current Radeon 9700 Mobility with 128MB. Who knows? I might even crack 20fps on SL =:)

The android av I pointed out the other week is now available. ^_^ It's over in Healy, priced at L$750 for the base avatar, L$100 for accessories like different hairstyles, or jetpack.

Could be geekily fun: CERN's announced that the first full run of the Large Hadron Collider on Sep 10 will be webcast by themselves and over Eurovision.

KeepVid.com is back again, but should it go down at any time, you can also find similar functionality at YouTubeDownload.nl.

Don't suppose anyone can compare the M-Audio 49e and 61es? The latter's not much more expensive than the gratifyingly affordable 49e, which I already have, even if it still remains back in the old warren - but in addition to adding an octave (for me, more of a handy thing to remap to other functions than for the spectral range), it claims to offer "semi-weighted" keys. But are they actually any good? For the price, I can't see it'd be anywhere near an approximation of a real piano, but if it could offer at least some sensation of key momentum, I'd be quite content. (This thread seems moderately positive)

Fendtron! (Needless to say, Yak deserves free beer for life for his incredible efforts in getting FA back up and purring along. It's great to see the site serving up photography, abstract artwork, porn, character reference sheets, cartoons, music, artwork tutorials, Flash animations, TF stories, and more)

Via vandringar, a nifty clip showing visualisations of telephone exchange activity, and road, sea, and air traffic across the UK.

And you thought the Bun-Vac 6000 was merely a Wallace & Gromit device? Check this out. ^_^; (And, my, what a fantastic URL =:)

I think, as World Ruler, I'll abolish copyright, and replace it with the right to derive financial gain from a given work.

O.o Stitch! The Anime I'm not quite sure what to make of this.. still, it appears to be from Madhouse, one of the best studios around, so there's some cause for cautious optimism.

Yays! I should be able to just send in a renewal fee to reactivate my old amateur radio license. ^_^ And with shiny new bands available, too. Though I suspect I shan't spend much time going down in frequency, but up - microwave radio modules are delightfully compact, after all, even if very low power as standard, in order to comply with their natural bands. (In about 6mm square, you've got everything you need for a 2.4GHz short range radio link, other than the antenna, and the inevitable decoupling capacitors. Just whisper sweet SPI to it, and off you go)

And there I was in the Big Smoke on Friday, for the Great British Beer Festival, at Earls Court, one of the larger exhibition venues in the UK. Which is, apparently, also currently hosting the Doctor Who Exhibition.. =:D As it turned out, there wasn't anywhere near time to consider such diversions. And it seem the venue management have yet to be introduced to the concept of "many thousands of people make for much warm, humid air". A fun time, though, especially getting to meet up with a former roomie, partaking of the odd dozen or so pints, ranging from a pure, unblended lambic (on cask, no less) - very sour, as would be expected, to the extent the staffer asked if I'd had it before, and offered a taste before letting me commit to a purchase. ^_^ Bath Ales' Wild Hare Ale was as good as I'd hoped - not far removed from the bottled version, but with that special mellowness only a cask ale can offer. St Austell's Black Prince was another that stood out for me, with the guide's description fulfilled admirably: "Black mild with malt and bubblegum aroma, a complex flavour combines toffee, fruit esters and bitterness finishing with an aftertaste of liquorice, fudge, and hops."

I really like the way Elevator Angels turned out, courtesy of the fine folks of Rabbit Valley. ^_^ I'm very tempted to make posters of it available through the store - think you might be interested? The colors are very nicely preserved by the printing process - no mean feat, given the magical palette used. ^_^

Mmm, CERN webcast... may have to check that out. I hope it's gonna be available for download after being streamed.

Good to hear keepvid's back, too; I already missed them yesterday!

Yay for Steve Purcell, too... although I've got to admit that I read his blog before (through spudvision; may even have been me that created that syndicated account, although I don't really recall anymore) and then stopped.

Mmm, regarding copyright, I'm more in favour of returning to a sensible term myself - 14 years should be enough. After all, the purpose is to encourage you to create more, not to allow you to sit on your rear making money from what you already came up with earlier. :) Keep it exclusive for that time (not limiting fair use, though), then release things into the public domain afterwards. Of course, making any non-commercial use fair use would still be a possibility; and there definitely should be an escrow requirement for things like software source code etc..

Hopefully, yes! They seem quite good about keeping the Eurovision Song Contest files up for a while, but that might all be separately managed from the general business of Eurovision itself. (Wish they didn't require the use of that funky Octoshape plugin, which in turn requires Flip4Mac to implement WMV, and usually the very latest version.. all rather silly, given the show appears on a multitude of torrents anyway, usually with your choice of commentary. ^_^ I admit, I've grown to like the commentary-free Eurovision feed they provide - Terry Wogan's a fun chap, but there are times he could and should just stay quiet)

It's a little odd KV would go down and then return without any explanation, but so it goes - I'm just relieved it's back. Trying to play many YouTube clips while they're downloading often results in framedropping - and if it's something I know I'll want to watch again, I might as well fetch it once and have it available, whether I've got a connection at the time or not.

Oh, handy. Wonder if LJ provides any way yet to check for the existence of feeds for a given URL.. sometimes they're easily guessed, but it'd be so much simpler if you could just run a search within the ones currently around. Wonder if anyone's come up with S&M avs.. must have by now. =:)

Indeed, a return to much more well-contained copyright periods would also be a highly welcome step. The public domain is a reality, but one that's under increasing commercial pressure, with corporations wanting to reap the benefits of a concept being part of everyday culture, but also maintaining special privilege thereon. Ooh, and an escrow for source! I do like that. Might be quite embarrassing for some authors, though. ^_^ I'd also say the duration of such privilege would depend on the nature of the work - moderate for music and movies, briefer for software, given the lifecycle there's so much shorter.

Mmm... the CERN page actually says that webcasts are available in "Flash format", too, so hopefully, you won't need anything beyond that.

And yeah, it's weird about Keepvid. It seems they're now routing all downloads through their own server, too - which seems pretty silly, given that the only thing they'll get out of it is bandwidth consumption (and tons of it!), but I guess it's up to them. The old bookmarklet doesn't work anymore, either, but at least there's a new one (although I haven't tried that yet).

As for feeds, there is a way; go to http://livejournal.com/syn and copy the feed URL into the input field at the bottom ("Add Feed by URL"). It works both with direct link to the feed (RSS or Atom) or regular HTML pages that contain at least proper <link rel="alternate" ...> tag in the header that points to a feed. :) Blogspot etc. all do this, I think, so most of the time, you can just directly paste the blog's URL.

Of course, if no syndicated account exists yet, you'll be asked to create one, but only if you've got a paid/permanent account (or maybe a sponsored one; I'm not sure, but it definitely doesn't work with basic accounts, or at least used to not do so). But that's really as easy as chosing a name that is neither too long nor taken yet.

As for copyright... yes, things are definitely skewed these days. For example, William Patry, a lawyer specialising in copyright with 26 years of experience under his belt, recently announced that he would shut down his widely-read and highly-acclaimed copyright blog, and one of the reasons he gave is that the current state of copyright law is just too depressing:

Copyright law has abandoned its reason for being: to encourage learning and the creation of new works. Instead, its principal functions now are to preserve existing failed business models, to suppress new business models and technologies, and to obtain, if possible, enormous windfall profits from activity that not only causes no harm, but which is beneficial to copyright owners. Like Humpty-Dumpty, the copyright law we used to know can never be put back together again: multilateral and trade agreements have ensured that, and quite deliberately.

But who knows? There may be hope after all (never say never). And yeah, having shorter terms for software would certainly make sense. ^^

'Course, if nothing else, you can be fairly sure geeks amongst the audience (watching a massive particle accelerator turning on? Nahhh =:) will be capturing and transcoding the best feeds available. ^_^ Flip4Mac does actually work quite well - seemingly better than WMP ever did. Possibly due to not having anything to do with Microsoft beyond the license? =:)

I'd imagine the way they're doing it is to circumvent any IP bans YouTube may have - the Dutch site claims they do block such downloading sites, which seems plausible, if they're to maintain the façade of "watching only, no downloading". All rather needless, but so it goes. (Mind you, for quality and features, YouTube's fairly bad anyway.. blip.tv's quite a lot better, offering much higher quality compression, and the option to easily permit downloading. Actually, even Google Video did, but YT gained the momentum)

Ah, it checks for duplicates? I thought LJ just went ahead and blindly created the syndication regardless. I should nose around that section of the site sometime - didn't they add some kind of showcase of feeds a while back?

Sadly, that summary does feel rather correct. One need look no further than Disney for a perfect example, where the copyright period's been progressively telescoped out, all in order to avoid anything of their output from falling into the public domain. And every time Disney asks, they're given just what they requested. (Particularly ironic, given how much of their cinematic work's drawn on traditional stories, long since public domain)

While Madhouse have produced a lot of really good stuff... They are not above producing tacky stupid and cheap kiddy fare based on corporate licence... eg, "Wing Commander Academy" and "Explosive Shooting Beyblade"

I suppose the same goes for actors alike - Bill Murray's had some wonderful roles, and some where he all but phoned in his performance for a role that required barely that. (Compare Steve Zissou to Osmosis Jones, for example)

I'll see if I can find out what the director's previous projects have been - although even that can turn up some surprises sometimes, in either direction of worthiness.

And it's not merely a prop! Here's Flanowa at AC08, although the audio quality's unfortunately rather poor. Does look like a fun instrument to play. Wonder if someone's come up with a telescopic version, for easy transportation.. ^_^

Maybe they'll have a US-style status indicator constantly indicating "GREEN: EARTH NOT YET DESTROYED". I know I'd have a tough time resisting. =:D Of course, the real payoff will - hopefully - follow later on, depending on what their experimentation reveals. It's quite mind-boggling, thinking how far we're delving into the fundamental nature of matter, of reality itself, insofar as we can. (It starts getting more complicated once we consider matter to be where polydimensional planes intersect, or good ole string theory)

I need to peek into what's going on with Ferrox - if it's indeed still a live, ongoing project, and if so, what kind of timescale's envisaged for the first alphas.

Heh! Might very well be the same case for him, actually - just a matter of paying the renewal fee, plus any supporting documentation he may still have. One area I'd love to get into is EME - totally impractical as a means of reliable communication, but there's such an appeal in bouncing a signal off the moon. ^_^ Only catch is, you need quite a hefty antenna array (on the order of a grid of 4x4 high gain Yagis) to focus the power accurately, and be able to gain some whisper of a signal back from anyone else.

BTW, as and when you're in SL, you might like to look around the Nautilus..

Oh, it was a great time. ^_^ I just wish I could have made a couple days of it - there's simply so much to choose from, and only a limited *ahem* throughput. It's such an opportunity, being able to try all these beers from around the UK, mostly never available outside a modest radius from their home brewery, not to mention those Belgian casks! (No Westvleteren Abt.12, but hey - this was Friday. They'd have been sold out long before =:) Such a wonderful celebration of the brewer's art, turning essentially similar ingredients into everything from floral bitters through to the deepest, treacliest stout. Fantastic! (™ Christoper Eccleston)

Can someone point me to a good comparison of current and future mobile GPUs? With the likelihood of new MacBook Pros in September, I'm curious to see what chips Apple will be choosing from. (In any event, it'll be a bit speedier than my current Radeon 9700 Mobility with 128MB. Who knows? I might even crack 20fps on SL =:)

Oh, you don't want to look for any GPU comparison articles. All you'll find is mountains of utterly pointless charts and graphs, and given the quality of writing generally found on PC enthusiast sites you'll get a generous helping of poor grammar as well. Here's a fine example.

If memory serves the first Intel Macs came with Radeon X1600-somethings so if you have a 9700, well... as the hick mechanic would say: "Low Framerates, huh? Well, heck, *there's yer problem!*" (While pointing a shaky oil-stained finger at the CPU.)

I submit that the word for Sunday should be "quartal". Not quite sure what it means, but goldarnit, we's ain't about t'let that stop us. YEEE-HAW!

Very interesting stuff, if a bit light on specifics - then again, when covering that many chips, it'd probably be a very bad idea to try covering any in much more detail. 'Course, my poor ole 9700's trailing along, looking around nervously at the rear. *sigh* Hey, don't suppose you've got a bit of space on your card for a shiny new MacBook Pro? =:)

I'll have to go sniffing around the specs on the ones around the top, I think. If the next MBPs are coming next month, then any chip choices were made at least a few months ago, so it's not going to be quite the very latest and greatest - but a smidge more powerful than this, whatever the GPU(s) turn out to be, indeed. ^_^;